XEffects - (Indoor Soft-Shadows + Post-Processing)

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 4:59 pm

EDIT: This wrapper is now obselete and has been replaced by XEffects - Reloaded which follows a whole different philosophy. You can still use XEffects but if you want multiple light sources and material independance I recommend using the newer one.

Hey the X-Platform shader pack has changed its name to XEffects, and is now using the "Irrlicht Engine License". There has been a major internal overhaul, and almost everything but the easy to use interface has changed. The interior code has been fully revamped and cleaned out, and the shaders have been redone so that you only require a small amount of shader code to achieve the same thing. The shaders are more powerful and accurate now also, supporting more accurate methods of calculating the shadows so that complex interior scenes are possible, and a bigger filtering kernal (Up to 16 samples, yes performance is still ok even on my 6200).

Update: New version with revamped interface and post-processing support. It can layer post processing effects for you using double-buffering, all you do is add the material.

MAJOR API CHANGES! So please read the Docs before using it in your projects. Shadows are now added using different shadow modes, allowing for easy configuration of what is casting/recieving etc. Enjoy.

Enough with the "jibber jabber", lets "get some nuts"

:

Nuff' said, help yourselves:
http://irrlichtirc.g0dsoft.com/BlindSide/XEffects.zip

Cheers

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 5:39 pm

wow, Kudos!

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:16 pm

That's really nice to hear. Guess I'll have to try it under Linux ASAP

Maybe yu can grant a license exception in case it gets included into Irrlicht?

Ico · Post by **Ico** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:32 pm

Hm ... my license.html says LGPL - typo?

Got some weird offset running the included shadow demo with highest settings (3, 3):

(GF 7800 GTX, latest non beta driver from web page - july release - on windows xp)

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 8:35 pm

Blind, this is what I get when I run the demo...Whats going on?

And just to make sure...these shadows are on the terrain right?

vitek · Post by **vitek** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 9:13 pm

karma, take a look at the error message in the console window.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:20 am

krama757 wrote: Blind, this is what I get when I run the demo...Whats going on?

And just to make sure...these shadows are on the terrain right?

Very strange indeed. Yeah in this demo the shadow is only on the terrain, you can enable it on the animated meshes too but the effect is not as good as I hoped.

It would be nice if you could post your computers specs etc, I can see in the console there are several shader errors, and I'm willing to bet your card is an ATI and uses a different, more restrictive shader compiler than mine. So if you could post up the errors in detail I can fix them and get it to work good on ATI cards too.

@hybrid, others
About the license, I'll change it to zlib when I get the chance, I'm not really sure why I chose LGPL in the first place anymore..

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 6:19 am

*thumbs up* nice one, blindside! This is what I need.

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 6:15 pm

Blind regarding my previous post you are 100% correct.

Compy specs:
1.87 Ghz Pentium M
ATI Radeon X700 M
1.5 GB DDR2 533

Yoran · Post by **Yoran** » Sun Sep 09, 2007 2:26 pm

Great, going to test it now!

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 8:39 am

Update, fixed ATI bug and changed to non-restrictive zlibe-style license. Have fun

paooolino · Post by **paooolino** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 8:05 am

that's amazing! I'd like to better understand how it works, so these are my questions:

- irr::scene::ICameraSceneNode* lightCam;

is a "virtual" camera used to generate the shadows, so it has to be attached to the light source, am I right?

- how about having more light sources and every light source generating a shadow? how can I achieve this?

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 2:40 am

Sorry that is difficult without editing the actual shader code, and also it is limited by hardware. For Shader model 3 it will be easy to have lots of lights though. Shader model 2 you can have a few lights but not over 4PCF quality.

Anyway this will require some small modifications to the shader.

shogun · Post by **shogun** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 12:03 am

I'm trying to get this to work in my own code, but I get nowhere. Are there any known Irrlicht-1.4-related problems with your code?

shogun · Post by **shogun** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 2:34 pm

Okay, I found something out. I use DirectX 9 - as soon as I set AntiAlias = true (with SIrrlichtCreationParameters), the shadows are gone. With AntiAlias = false everything is okay ...

BlindSide, is this a bug or something?